Glitter, gloss and glamour

Press, 24 April 1987, Page 14

Glitter, gloss and glamour

By JOAN CURRY

Sunday night was a night of glitter and gloss. On One we had the elaborate ice ballet with Torvill and Dean, who blazed across the screen in “Fire and Ice,** and on Two the first instalment of the three-part series “If Tomorrow Comes” introduced us to a group of ornamental people who could make our lives, and our wardrobes, seem dismal by comparison.

“Fire and Ice” was a magical event It was 50 minutes of romance as Torvill and Dean, as the Ice Princess and the Fire Prince, swooped and spun in an icescape of glassy structures and snowy drifts glittering with reflected light The effect was stunning. The fire people writhed among flares and leaping shadows while the ice people, in cool, marbled costumes and jagged head-dresses, glided through their silvery kingdom as the story unfolded. The Ice King’s cloak was especially grand: it almost crackled with icicles. Torvill and Dean are an appealing pair whose dazzling talents make difficult manoeuvres look attractive and effortless. And they added a generous measure of comedy to their performance. When Christopher Dean as the Fire Prince skidded into the Ice Kingdom, he clowned through a clever but always elegant routine as he found his feet and learned to balance on skates. And he looked so wonderfully solemn about it.

“If Tomorrow Comes” is shaping up to be one of

those programmes that nearly everyone will watch and hardly anyone will admit to enjoying. It is full of glossy people who live splendidly In penthouses or mansions and entertain on yachts. They have unbelievably glamorous clothes and smooth skins. Nobody is fat or plain. Tracey Whitney, who starts off by being rather wet, is transformed by a series of , distressing events into an adventuress of the criminal kind. She is pregnant but unmarried, her mother shoots herself, she tries to kill the Mafia chiseller who ruined her mother, she is arrested for armed robbery and sentenced to 15 years, gets beaten up in prison and loses the baby, is rejected by her fiance, saves the warden’s daughter from drowning and earns a pardon, revenges herself on the chiseller and the fiance, can’t get a respectable job on the outside, and finally turns to crime. Jeff Stevens is a conman who marries into the jet set and wishes he hadn’t He diddles the rich and gives to the poor (himself and his uncle Willy, who runs a carnival), but turns righteous when he finds out that his new brother-in-law, who

looks, like Jaws with red hair, makes money by “churning” or recycling his clients* stocks. That, you see, is legal but immoral, whereas Jeffs frauds and illegal but moral.

Jeff revenges himself on his decorative, faithless wife and on his slippery brother-in-law and turns his back on the. upper crust with its crummy values. Meanwhile, hovering in the background in his bleak apartment and ready to pounce, is the insurance investigator Daniel Cooper, with a trendy stubble and a surly manner. .

That was just the first episode. It is probably going to he enormous fun and most of us win watch it with scornfully curled lipa. On Monday night we celebrated 31 years of the Muppets, from black-and-white beginnings to the latest captivating, bobbleeyed menagerie. Miss Piggy was still ravishing, Kermit looked dapper and almost in command of the occasion, and .Animal upstaged Rita Moreno in a snippet from years back that I still remember with joy. And Rolf, who plays the piano,' still looked exactly like the dog from two doors down the road.